"It just seems..." is not a good way to argue

Photo by Pascal Bernardon on Unsplash

Over at Bentham’s Newsletter, Bentham’s Bulldog argues that selfishness is irrational. The specifics of the argument aren’t relevant to any points I want to make, so I’ll just focus on how BB argues for his position.

According to BB, without a belief in God, there is unlikely to be a defensible case for immaterial souls, which in turn probably leaves us without any defensible account of the continuity of identity:

But if there aren’t immaterial souls, then what could fix facts about personal identity? While you bear certain similarities to your four-year-old self, there is no highly robust sense in which you are the same person. Just as there may be no fact of the matter about whether a ship remains the same after changing out its planks, there may be no fact of the matter about whether a person remains the same after undergoing a bunch of changes.

BB trots out a few intuition pumps that serve to elicit this perspective from the reader, but let’s just grant it for the sake of argument: No god → no soul → no defensible account of the continuity of personal identity.

According to BB:

I think this illustrates that identity facts, given atheism, are probably vague and frequently indeterminate. There’s no really robust sense in which you will be the same person in one year. But then why care about your future self? It can’t be because they’re you in some deep sense! There is no deep sense in which they’re you!

For the sake of argument, then, we’re granting that there’s no deep sense in which anyone will be the same person in the future. This is supposed to somehow make caring about oneself over others irrational:

On this picture, caring more about your future self is like caring more about some stranger just because they resemble you more. It just seems clearly irrational. It involves caring about some nebulous, vague, and arbitrary property that isn’t the source of any genuine reasons. Without a non-physical soul to fix identity, there are just degrees of similarity. [Emphasis mine]

I have a simple objection to BB: No it doesn’t. I simply don’t care what “seems irrational” to BB. Nothing about preferring myself over others seems irrational to me, even given these assumptions. I don’t think non-instrumental preferences, cares, values, and so on are subject to evaluation as being rational or not; I view rationality as only concerning instrumental considerations. BB also adds that:

It involves caring about some nebulous, vague, and arbitrary property that isn’t the source of any genuine reasons.

I reject BB’s conception of “genuine reasons,” so I don’t think anything is the source of “genuine reasons” of the relevant kind.

The fulcrum of BB’s entire argument is an appeal to his personal intuitions, intuitions I don’t share and don’t care about. This is a bizarre and unconvincing way to argue, and it’s disappointing to see post after post from BB where arguments ultimately turn on remarks like “this just seems irrational” or “this just seems obvious” or “that just seems crazy.” BB rarely qualifies these remarks with a “…to me” or otherwise acknowledge that he’s making appeals to his personal thinking, rather than to some publicly evaluable method or standards, and rarely offers much more than such appeals. We will be given various thought experiments that are supposed to elicit the intuition in question, but whether they work or not will turn on whether one happens to share BB’s intuitions. I don’t. So why should I care at all what “seems” to be the case to BB? Why does anyone?

BB gives us another argument:

Imagine a person who only cared about their present self? Or perhaps one who cared about their welfare at all times except on future Tuesdays. Such a person would be irrational! That some period of pain or joy falls on a future Tuesday is no reason to care less about it. Similarly, we behave irrationally when we procrastinate and neglect our future welfare.

No arguments, evidence, or reasons are presented that show such a person is “irrational.” BB simply asserts that they are. I don’t think they would be. BB continues:

This illustrates that rationality isn’t just about getting whatever it is we want. The person who only wants current welfare behaves irrationally in neglecting their future welfare. But if it’s irrational not to care about your future self, why isn’t it irrational not to care about other people?

How does it “illustrate” this? BB presents us with a case where a person has weird preferences. BB has the intuition that this person is irrational, in that it’d be irrational for them to act on the basis of the specific thing they want in this case. This is then supposed to “illustrate that rationality isn’t just about getting whatever it is we want.” But how has this been illustrated? All BB has done is appeal to his personal preexisting conception of rationality as not being exclusively about what we want. BB isn’t “illustrating” that rationality isn’t about getting whatever we want; BB is simply employing a conception of rationality that already isn’t about getting whatever we want. Nothing has been “illustrated” beyond BB providing us an autobiographical window into a fragment of his personal psychology.

BB then considers how someone might try to defend the rationality of caring about their future selves but not others:

“They’re not me—what happens to them doesn’t affect me.” But similarly, the person who cares only about his present self could say “my future self isn’t present me—what happens to them doesn’t affect present me.”

“I just don’t care about their welfare as much as my own.” But similarly, the person who cares only about his present self could describe that he doesn’t care about his future welfare.

“You’ll later regret ignoring your future welfare.” But the person who just cares about his present self could object that his present self will never regret it. In a parallel way, other people will regret you not taking seriously their interests.

In each case, the explanation of why one is permitted to care only about one’s own welfare can be mirrored by the view that one is permitted to care only about one’s own present welfare. So long as we recognize that caring only about your present self is irrational, by symmetry, we should recognize that not caring about other people’s welfare is irrational.

What strange language. Permitted? I don’t need anyone’s permission to care about my future self, or to not care about anyone else.

BB goes on to make a number of other strange claims:

This claim is surprising but not extremely so. It seems that one has a reason to pull a child out of a pond even if one doesn’t want to. But if you have a reason to do something, then rationality would incline you to do it.

How does rationality incline anyone to do anything? Is this a claim about how human cognition works? Is “rationality” somehow tied to motivation? If so, how? How do “reasons” interact with rationality such that they “incline” us to do things? What are these reasons, and what mechanisms move from the fact that one has a reason to the cognitive processes associated with judgment and decision-making that ultimately result in initiating a particular task? Talk of us having “inclinations” sounds like talk of psychology. If this remark does interface with psychology, it does so in a mysterious and dubious way. If not, it’s unclear what it could mean, or whether what it does mean has any practical relevance.

BB also reiterates the same questionable talk about reasons “coming” from some source, as though they are an energy source like Pokémon energy cards:

I also think this position becomes more intuitive if you think that our reasons for acting don’t come from our desires. Even if one had a desire to cause themselves future agony, they wouldn’t have a reason to cause themselves future agony. But if this is right, then the fact that a person only cares about their own welfare tells us little about what they have reason to care about.

I address why this talk of reasons is profoundly misguided here:

Next, we are for once given a rare bit of explicitly qualified autobiography:

Lastly, I find the position more intuitive when I reflect. When, for example, I think about loved ones and imagine things from their perspective, it seems like the rational thing to do is care about their interests as my own. If we saw more clearly about morality and rationality, then we’d see everyone this way.

Once again, I don’t share this intuition. But let’s suppose I did. Would it support BB’s case? I don’t think so. Note how BB focuses on the intuitions of “loved ones.” But BB seems to think we should be less selfish in a broader sense: that we should care about the welfare of people who aren’t our loved ones. Yet when I try to adopt the points of views of these people, I don’t find anything remotely rational about caring about their interests as my own. BB seems to have narrowly reflected on a subset of considerations that favor his view when I think a broader form of reflection would militate against it. Selective intuition mongering, it seems.

I also question the extent to which we can imagine things from other people’s perspective. I grant that we can do this to a limited extent, but the extent to which we can do so will be incredibly shallow, heavily biased, and influenced by our knowledge of those people (and, importantly, our ignorance of those people, along with whatever assumptions we make about them, correct or not). As such, I think BB is layering one questionable psychological exercise (imagining the perspective of others) on top of another (reflecting on one’s “intuitions” about what’s “rational”).

BB never clarifies what he means by “irrational” but it wouldn’t make sense for it to be an instrumentalist conception of rationality. As such, from the very outset, BB is employing what appears to be a normatively realist concept of rationality and expecting this to have persuasive force with readers. In other words, I am expected to be concerned about what is or isn’t rational independent of whether it would be conducive to my goals or desires. Let’s pull apart acting on the basis of our desires and acting on the basis of what’s rational for a moment. Suppose, after considerable reflection, there were two courses of action you could take:

• Desire-optimizing
  This course of action optimizes achieving your goals and desires. Not simply some whim you had at a given moment, but your overarching goals, desires, and life plans. If you wanted to have a happy, flourishing family, this is what you’d achieve. If you wanted to help others, you’d achieve this, too. And so on. However, it turns out that acting in accord with desire-optimization is inconsistent with non-instrumental conceptions of rationality, such that in optimizing for your desires, you are technically acting in a way that is irrational.

• Rationality-optimizing
  This course of action optimizes compliance with what is non-instrumentally rational and what you have stance-independent reasons to do, independent of whether doing so would achieve any of your goals or desires. Now let us suppose that this course of action would lead to your utter misery and your failure to achieve any of your goals and desires. You will suffer immensely, as will your friends and family, and none of your ideals, goals, or personal preferences will be achieved. But your actions would be perfectly rational.

Which course of action would you favor?

Non-instrumentalist conceptions of rationality have no appeal to me at all. I only care about achieving my goals and desires. And I care more about myself and my friends, family, and loved ones than I do about everyone else. So do most people. Would I prefer if people were a bit less selfish? And that they donated more to charity, did more to help others, and so on? Absolutely. But I see no reason to believe, nor to care, whether being selfish is non-instrumentally “irrational.” I simply don’t care, and I don’t think most people would, on reflection, either. I think BB’s notion of rationality is bizarre and motivationally irrelevant, and the sooner philosophy can dispense with this absurd way of thinking and speaking about normative considerations the better.

At the same time, BB and others continue to lean so heavily on personal appeals to their intuitions that their “arguments” have very little substance to them. This is why I focus so much on metaphilosophy. This epidemic of appeals to intuition remains a massive impediment to productive philosophy and so long as people continue to be enamored of a broad metaphilosophical approach centered on intuition, the field will make little progress.